More Than a Score (42 page)

The Word That Made Me an Activist

I will not name the state senator who addressed the assembled school administrators at a hotel conference room in Austin that cold February morning. Having been a teacher once upon a time, she was considered an education expert by her colleagues in the statehouse. She had spent her political career advancing numerous education policies; most had either grown the standardized-testing culture in Texas public schools or fortified a blatantly inequitable school funding system.

During the legislative session that was under way then—when I sat alongside several hundred other Texas administrators listening to the senator's address—she had been at the forefront of pushing bills that promised drastic cuts in education spending as well as bills that thrust a new testing regime upon Texas's schoolchildren. STAAR—the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness—was the name of the newly proposed test, and her pride in its rigor and technocratic brilliance was evident. Students in high school would be required to pass no fewer than fifteen (
fifteen
!) standardized tests in order to graduate. STAAR would be much harder than any previous test; it would eat up more class time than any previous test; and, at $90 million per year to develop and deliver, it would cost the state far more than any other test, ever. If no one else was happy about it, Pearson certainly was.

As an educator, I am not opposed to testing students. I have written and administered many tests myself over the years, some of them better than others. But standardized, high-stakes testing has at least three foundational problems that my classroom tests never had. First of all, the cut scores for standardized tests are arbitrarily set by politically appointed officials, in secret. In my classes, kids knew from the first day of the school year that a correct-answer rate of 70 percent was passing, and anything less was failing. Not so with STAAR—the percentage of Texas kids who pass would be determined when the education commissioner discreetly set the cut score, which I have come to call the “God number” of school accountability. With that single private decision, some person in Austin could make all of our students into “successes” or deem them all “failures.” This is the magic undergirding the supposed science of school accountability, and it has very little to do with what's best for kids. Such a perverse misapplication of testing is anathema to many educators, and it is ripe for malfeasance and manipulation. A cut score really only has one use: to engineer a desired political outcome. Second, I had prompt access to the results of my classroom tests. I could hone my instruction based on the student outcomes captured by them. STAAR exams would be taken at the very end of the school year, however; results would be available the following year, when the teachers working with the assessed students no longer had them on their rolls. The tests hold no formative value. Third, with my classroom tests, there was appropriate flexibility in determining the stakes attached. I could throw out a test altogether if I decided it was a bad test. With today's prescriptive accountability, adjustments can't readily be made if test items are inappropriate. In fact, major multinational corporations keep their tests so incredibly secure—so that they can juice their profit margins by reusing old test items—that it's virtually impossible for teachers, students, or parents to even identify problems with the tests so that flaws in test development can be discovered. The great Pineapple-gate controversy in New York a few years back—when the state's education commissioner threw out several ambiguous questions from a nonsensical passage about a “pineapple with sleeves”—only came to light because students ridiculed the passage on Facebook.

In short, the problem isn't the tests. It's the convoluted and wrong-headed policies that have been overlaid upon the tests by people who really don't know what they are doing but are nonetheless eager to do it. STAAR and tests like it could conceivably become wonderful tools if they were to be “jail-broken” and entrusted to educators for the bottom-up development of appropriate uses. The tests could perhaps be saved if they were forcibly converted into instructional tools rather than being used solely for political purposes. But they are currently entirely used for political purposes.

After empathizing about the devastating funding cuts facing local schools and explaining that it was all the economy's fault, the senator positively gushed about her new test. Because student learning was so important, the growing cries of administrators statewide that the STAAR test be deferred would have to be ignored. Our state was so broke that we would have to lay off twenty-five thousand school employees, but it wasn't broke enough to defer Pearson's nearly $500 million contract. The senator looked across the roomful of administrators and said that the new test was simply “non-negotiable.”

Non-negotiable.
One word. The word that turned me into an activist.

When the senator took questions after her address, I took the audience microphone and explained that my district was reducing its staff of sixty-something by at least nine employees.

“How many people is Pearson laying off?” I asked.

“I don't know,” she replied.

“You're saving the test but not the teachers,” I told her.

I couldn't hear her response over the applause of my colleagues.

After the state senator wrapped up her remarks I returned to my hotel room and pondered the plight of public school students, teachers, and administrators. Our needs were ignored. Our cries fell on deaf ears. The senator was exactly right in her choice of verbiage, I realized. There was truly no means of negotiating for public education supporters. Teachers, administrators, trustees, and public school students and parents at that time had no voice in the halls of power. The wants of the Texas business lobby would not step aside for the needs of learners and teachers.

So I decided I wouldn't negotiate. On a February night in Austin, Texas, I shifted from being a passive pushover to a fervent believer in the power of what a prominent education reformer would later derisively label “aggressive populism.” Before that night I had been mostly worried about myself and my future. I had harbored deep professional and personal qualms about the way testing was used to paint schools as “good” or “bad” while funding inequities in my state were downplayed so that lawmakers' educational decisions were protected from public judgment, but I had held my tongue. I had been a principal at a school that was funded at several thousand dollars less per pupil than neighboring schools, and I had labored to match better-resourced schools' academic results. I had seethed privately at the injustice done to my students, my teachers, my community, and myself by these policies. But I hesitated to raise my voice. I had three kids to take care of. I had a house payment and a car payment. Someone else would have to speak up. Maybe someone in the legislature would take up the challenge.

But I knew they wouldn't. I was pretty sure they didn't even understand what their policies were doing at the local level. It was time for educators to step out on a limb and publicize what was being done to kids and communities in the name of accountability. In my angst that night, I sought a way to express myself. I looked to a letter as famous and as sacred as any ever written in the history of my state—the letter penned by Colonel William Barret Travis just before the fall of the Alamo. In it, he pleaded in vain for help from Texas's leaders as a grave threat surrounded him on all sides.

I wrote what has come to be known as “The Alamo Letter” and submitted it to my hometown newspaper
and to
Washington Post
blogger Valerie Strauss. Addressed to the state senator and the four state representatives whose regions touched my school district, the letter was provocative and direct.

Gentlemen,

I am besieged by a hundred or more of the legislators under Rick Perry. I have sustained a continual bombardment of increased high-stakes testing and accountability-related bureaucracy and a cannonade of gross underfunding for 10 years at least and have lost several good men and women. The ruling party has demanded another round of pay cuts and furloughs, while the schoolhouse be put to the sword and our children's lunch money be taken in order to keep taxes low for big business. I am answering the demand with a (figurative) cannon shot, and the Texas flag still waves proudly from our flagpole. I shall never surrender the fight for the children of Perrin.

Then, I call on you my legislators in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch. The enemy of public schools is declaring that spending on a shiny new high-stakes testing system is “non-negotiable”; that, in essence, we must save the test but not the teachers. The enemy of public schools is saying that Texas lawmakers won't raise 1 penny in taxes in order to save our schools.

If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and fight for the kids in these classrooms like an educator who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his community. Make education a priority!

With all due respect and urgency,

John Kuhn

The letter spread like wildfire across Texas and even nationally. I was invited to give a speech at a North Texas college alongside reformer principal Steve Perry. I was then asked to read my letter at the first-ever Save Texas Schools rally later that spring. When I accepted this invitation, I didn't know how many people would be there to listen. I expected a small crowd of five hundred or seven hundred and fifty people. I was nervous: I would be standing on the steps of the state capitol and criticizing the powerful men and women inside. But I had already cast my lot. There was no turning back.

When my family and I showed up at a shaded park in Austin where the Save Texas Schools march would begin, I realized that this was a bigger deal than I had appreciated. Someone had done a masterful job of organizing. It probably helped that Texas teachers and public school parents statewide were in a panic; the talk from politicians and think tanks had been decidedly grim and antagonistic toward the very concept of public education. A distant bullhorn announced that it was time to march to the capitol building, and we filled the street. When I say “filled the street,” I mean that both sidewalks and a four-lane city street were completely packed with a crush of people, and the crush stretched for who-knew-how-many blocks. I couldn't see where the crowd began or ended; the surging throng snaked through the city and the voices of the multitude—strangely joyous—bounced off the buildings. I had never heard or seen anything like it. Teachers and parents pushed their strollers side by side. Dozens of groups wore matching shirts emblazoned with the names of their schools. Everyone who counted on public schools had a dog in this fight—Republicans, Democrats, Independents. The bipartisan chorus chanted together and held their signs aloft, pleading for support in any way they knew how.

On that beautiful spring day, public education was the greatest unifier in Texas. I thought about standing in front of them all, standing behind that microphone and speaking. The biggest crowd I had ever addressed before was a campus faculty meeting, and it wasn't even a big campus. My heart began to pound. I kissed my wife goodbye, wondering if I wasn't maybe kissing my career goodbye as well, and I scaled the capitol steps. My middle child, six at the time, went with me up onto the stage. We sat in the ardent sun and I looked out at a sea of people. More than thirteen thousand public education supporters would listen to me read the letter and also a barnburner of a speech that I would reprise in July at the Save Our Schools National March and Call to Action in Washington, DC. Since then, I have written dozens of commentaries for Texas newspapers, education blogs at
Education Week
and the
Washington Post
, and websites like CNN.com. I've spoken at three Save Texas Schools rallies now, and I've participated in events from Missouri to Washington, DC.

I got involved in the movement against over-testing and testing misuse because I felt that I had a moral obligation to oppose a seemingly relentless onslaught of underfunding and testing and punishing, an approach to education born in Texas some three decades before, that, until recently, showed no sign of letting up. This approach to education was built on a lie, a “Texas Miracle” built on fudged numbers that had been thoroughly debunked. Miraculously, though, even though everyone everywhere knew the “Texas Miracle” never really happened, the policy prescriptions touted as its causal agents had stuck and spread nationwide. We were addicted, nationally, to a cocktail with harsh side effects that had never actually cured any disease.